Posts tagged “Night Time”

As happy as I was with my previous “creative offering”, I wasn’t “quite” so happy to have it sitting in such a prominent place on my blog, as it didn’t seem to really fit with the general scheme of things, so I’m hitting you with another quick post, and I’ve moved it out of position slightly… Call me fickle… lol… I’m thinking it will be the beginning of a little series of fruity posts though (or at least food based), if I can dream up a few more ideas… ;)

So here’s a night shot taken whilst on holiday a while back… Oh to live in a cottage like this, even if it was directly opposite the churchyard that scared the wotsits out of my daughter… ;)

I also need to say a huge thank you to Natalie at Phusion Photography too, or The Fuse as per her Blog, for her glowing appraisal of one of my early flickr HDR images, and how it inspired her to try it out… although I have to admit it’s an image I’d not be entirely impressed with these days…. but we live and learn and improve hopefully… Check out her sites, as they are amazing, and if I’m in any small way responsible for the images she produces now, then I’ll happily take the credit… lol…

Well I did previously allude to having done a few scary things whilst on holiday, and here’s another… although it wasn’t scary for me, more so for my daughter… lol… which is ALWAYS amusing… ;)

Churchyards in the dead of night are great places, I think… It’s no wonder people are dying to get in there.. *groan* !!… Sorry… lol… I do love them though, and have spent many an entirely comfortable hour in them with the camera… (and sometimes without.. lol)… more worried about being arrested than anything else… One of my goals whilst away though was to follow in Mrs A’s footsteps, and get me some star trails… so off to the nearest churchyard I headed (what better place is there to not be disturbed)…

The previous night I’d also tried my hand at some star shots at the beach (those to come later), and my daughter wanted to accompany me, given her new found interest in photography (and the opportunity to stay up extra late !!). Well I agreed, as it’s always good to have a buddy at night… plus I find you appear much less suspicious when with your daughter, should anyone call the police about the crazy person creeping around in the dark… lol…

Well this night I asked her if she also wanted to come to the churchyard with me… and you could literally HEAR the turmoil going on in her head… ANOTHER extra late night, and some more photography, and time doing fun stuff with dad… against the thought of going in to a churchyard, in the dark… late at night !!!… LOL… Her first response did make me laugh though, as she responded with “But won’t there be real living ghosts in there ??”… Real Living Ghosts !!!… Hahaha… How about that for a contradiction in terms… Well after some reassurance about ghosts, she agreed… We arrived at the church, and I opened the gate, and she exclaimed “Are we actually GOING IN !!”…. Ummmmm… YES !!… lol… So we entered the churchyard, and had a walk around to find the best spots, and as we rounded the corner of the church (with her leading), we disturbed a tree full of starlings… and they weren’t best pleased judging by the noise they made.. LOL.. You should have seen her jump, and the accompanying squeal was hilarious.. Yeah I know, I’m mean.. ;)

Anyways… Enough words… Here’s the important stuff… The resulting pictures…

These were both shot fully manual at ISO 100; f5.6; 10mm and each a single 15 minute exposure…

I also did a little bit of light painting with the torch in this one, to illuminate some of the foreground and church a bit..

Another amusing incident was with a black churchyard cat… a particularly noisy churchyard cat.. lol… Whilst we were round the darker backside of the church, we heard some rustling in the bushes… Well I knew it would be an animal of some description, but my daughter wasn’t quite so convinced… and then the glowing eyes appeared, accompanied by the loudest and strangest meowing… lol… It was a constant almost monotone me’eeew me’eeew me’eeew me’eeew… Scared the cr*p out of my daughter until I shone the torch on this little black kitty bounding through the long grass… ;)

Oh… and lastly… and entirely unrelated to this post… Here’s a link to a page of posts for Karma’s Scavenger Hunt for April…

So this past few weeks or so Karma has been running a little scavenger hunt, and I’ve put together a number of shots for her list of things to find… and you can see ALL of my shots here if you like… Some of them are new shots, and some are ones that I’ve had to pull from some previous outings… Hopefully that’s allowed… ;)

This one is one of the old shots I called upon from a night out in London… Have to admit there’s some pretty cool shots to be had up there…

So I know this is an old old shot, and I really must take some time to recreate a far better version, now I have a better camera, and have learnt far more about photography… but for now I decided to throw this one on here, as I was reminded of it yesterday by a similarly titled shot… lol… But this is a Mazda, so I’m actually allowed to say zoom zoom… lol…

This was created by setting the camera up in the car on an extremely stable tripod, and wrapping the seatbelt around it too, to avoid any accidental shots of the whole thing flying through the windshield… This was set up as a fully manual shot…

Firstly I switched to manual focus and set it to focus on the A pillar… I did this to avoid having the camera hunt for a focal point in the low light…

The aperture was set to f11 to give me the prime dof for the lens, and an adequate shutter speed to capture the light trails…

The focal length set to 10mm, to incorporate as much in the image as possible…

The ISO speed was set to 100, to again give me a long enough exposure time to capture the light trails, and also to maintain the best quality and avoid any high ISO graininess…

Finally I set the camera to bulb mode, and using a remote shutter release exposed for (in this shot) 30 seconds… I tried other exposures, but given the previous manual settings this gave the most acceptable result…

In my next attempt ideally I want to obtain better colour, as the sodium lighting threw the colour balance so far out that even editing the raw in photoshop was unable to bring it back to where I wanted it…. That’s the plan at least… We’ll see….

Yes… That’s pretty much what we were last night… Armed and dangerous, and very much a threat to national security with our cameras and tripods…. lol… Maybe the tripods were confused with missile launchers… ;)

I mean seriously… Exactly how much damage can you do to a piece of architecture with a camera !?!?!…

So last night the City of London was due a nocturnal visit, and I was severely reprimanded by a power-hungry security guard, obviously looking for a quick kill…. And for what reason you may ask… What high security government complex did I infiltrate… What national armourment access codes did I steal… Hmmmm…. Well funnily enough, all I managed was to stand on his “step”, just to see if there was a different angle for a shot…. which there wasn’t…. So I stepped off again…. and walked away…

Black and White or Colour ??..

He tracked me down though a few minutes later, and started spouting the section blah blah blah rules of trespassing…. and how I’d “stepped on to their property !!!!”…. I was polite and apologised, saying I didn’t realise, as there was no delineation between public / private property…. but he was off on some power trip, and started spouting how my house was private, and he’d not walk in to my living room the way I “stood on his step”…. Lol…

Then he pointed out some tiny studs buried in the paving, and said “If you see these studs, then you’re allowed to stand THAT side, but you’re trespassing THIS side…. Then he radio’d in to head office how he’d foiled a major security breach…. LOL…. They are SUCH idiots…. He was one of many last night, all on the same power trip…. Give them a badge and a uniform and they’re like the next Fidel Castro… ;))

Now I’m not normally known for night photography, but the other night I had the opportunity to get out and about during the hours of darkness and try out a new area of photographical expertise… and it was kinda fun I have to admit… but kinda cold too… lol…

Here’s one of the results and I’ve tried to give it a bit more of a menacing mood than just a standard black and white conversion… Hopefully it worked out ok….

Funky Slug Photo’s on Flickr

For an alternative to the photography I have posted here, please also check out my Flickr website, where I go under the pseudonym of Funky Slug. Here you can preview a much larger selection of my work.